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Brian Murdoch provides an alternative view of the Middle Ages, showing the anarchy and decadence which lurked below the surface of a devout and conformist society. The grinning gargoyle, which mocked the solemnity of Gothic cathedrals, symbolises the violence, depravity and irreverence inherent in man which could not be suppressed by the church. Texts translated from the prose, chronicles and verse of the period, such as the Trial of Gilles de Rais, Boccaccio's Decameron, I Have a Gentil Cok, A Black Mass and Metrical Verses on the Subject of his Prick, reveal the wilder aspects of medieval man. Brian Murdoch has assembled and translated texts from Medieval Latin, Old French, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Old and Middle English, Old Irish and Welsh which will redefine the Middle Ages for the modern reader.

Mike Mitchell's new translation replaces S. Goodrich's 1912 version of the first German bestselling novel. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, caught in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The novel follows a boy from the Spessart named Simplicius in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War as he grows up in the depraved environment and joins the armies of both warring sides, switching allegiances several times. Born to an illiterate peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons and is eventually adopted by a forest hermit. He is conscripted at a young age into service, and from there embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, travels to Russia, and countless other adventures.

The ghoulish misdeeds and conflicted psychology of the undead are memorably explored in this classic supernatural thriller, published in England in 1983 and previously unavailable in the US. In the terse, atmospheric opening pages, an unnamed narrator finds a partially charred manuscript in the vicinity of an abandoned country house in Cornwall that has mysteriously burned to the ground. It's the "Narrative of John Richard Le Perrowne," born in 1830 to middle-aged parents, sickly and reclusive throughout a lonely childhood-and the chosen victim of his ancestress Helena, a vampire whose seductive presence leads John into a thrilling new anti-world of empowerment and glamour. But the initiate vampire retains a conscience, and Farrington expertly contrasts his reluctant surrender to the lure of the night with the amoral Helena, a coven of inordinately bloodthirsty fellow creatures, and the young farm girl (Elizabeth) who becomes John's creation, far outdistancing him in calculated villainy. The story is exactly as baroque and lurid as it needs to be, and its most effective set pieces (John awakening in bed to find Helena lying beside him; a feverish dream that's prelude to an equally appalling reality) have a truly cinematic intensity. Farrington's prose is pitched agreeably high, and his protagonist's increasingly fearful intuitions are expressed with vivid emotion and mordant irony ("Death . . . seems much sweeter when you know you cannot have it"). And the closing sequences build impressively, as Perrowne discovers the truth of the ancestral secret that has shaped his fate, travels to Ireland in search of the "Master Revenant" rumored to be the father of them all, undertakes a climactic "journey to Hell," and experiences a grotesque parody of the Resurrection. Thus summarized, it sounds egregiously flamboyant; in fact, it's smashingly effective. Far superior to most of Anne Rice's empurpled Gothicism, and, quite possibly, the best vampire novel since Dracula. (Kirkus Reviews)

Previous edition: Oxford: Clarendon, 1955.

The latest volume in the Dedalus European fantasy series, this anthology of short stories includes a wide range of texts covering the period from nineteenth century until today. The richness and diversity of the stories reflects the long tradition of fantasy in Finnish literature, ranging from the classics to experimental literature, from satire to horror. This is the first collection of Finnish short stories of its kind and almost all are translated into English for the first time.

Modern Spanish classic.

"Two people meet on a train: the young man is imagining a novel, and imagining the life of the young woman. A waiter rushes out to find a girl he fancied who hasn't paid her bill, only to find a diary in which their fictitious flirtation is anatomised. But the story actually begins with a man taking a leak after making love to his wife. He has the inklings of a novel, but thoughts will keep intruding, with all their seductive possibilities. The man on the train is living in an England that has decided, with characteristic diffidence and lack of fuss, that it no longer wants to live under a totalitarian regime which has lasted for 40 years. I say totalitarian, but think more of Brazil, a world of terribly genial tyranny, where officialdom tries so hard to be accommodating. And Duncan has another story, one prompted by the memory of his father's car crashing down a slope. As with all good postmodernist novels, the endless digressions are more soothing than jarring." Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality." The Sunday Times "A writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble. Like much of the most interesting British fiction around at the moment, Music, in a Foreign Language is being published in paperback by a small independent publishing house, giving hope that a tentative but long overdue counter-attack is being mounted on the indelible conservatism of the modern English novel.With this novel he has begun his own small stand against cultural mediocrity, and to set himself up, like his hero, as ' a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.'" Jonathan Coe in The Guardian

Covering the first 24 hours of the teaching career of Theodoros P., The Spiritual Meadow is set on the Greek island of Porphyri upon which the central character will witness both his past and future life through a distortion of time and space

An accidental meeting between two old acquaintances turns into a long evening of bitter, drunken humiliations for both. In her second novel, Deambrosis (Milagrosa, 2002), a French author of Greek and Spanish descent, offers a brief, almost parable-like tale that's bent on exposing the arrogance that accompanies success and the neuroses that pollute a life full of failures. Dorita and Carmen knew each other in high school, but when they accidentally meet again on a winter's day outside a bustling Spanish department store, they're 50-somethings who've settled into very different lifestyles: Carmen is a mousy, timid schoolteacher caring for her sister's family instead of starting one of her own, while Dorita married up, to a cardiologist, and enjoys a ladies-who-lunch lifestyle of nice clothes and shiny jewelry. Dorita's proud enough-and insecure enough-to tell anybody who'll listen just how fortunate she is, and soon after the two decide to go out for drinks, Dorita turns Carmen into her punching bag, criticizing Carmen's beverage choices, her coat, her purse, even the handkerchief she uses to clean her glasses. Dorita becomes only more verbally abusive as the night drunkenly drags on, which of course only reveals the depths of her neediness; by the time Dorita attempts to seduce a young man in a dive bar, she's a thoroughly grotesque, hollowed-out creature. The familiar, hackneyed version of a story with two characters like these would end with Dorita's comeuppance and Carmen's sudden acquisition of a backbone. But Deambrosis resists the impulse to fall into cliches; though Dorita's actions are contemptible, she's not entirely wrong about Carmen, and as we learn more about Carmen's history (including a long-kept secret relating to the title of the book), she becomes as pitiable as she is goodhearted. Though it's a relatively unambitious novel-more like a one-act play than a full-bodied narrative-it accomplishes quite a bit within its limited boundaries. Slim but potent. (Kirkus Reviews)

When in 1916, Mario de Sa-Carneiro committed suicide in Paris at the age of 26, he left behind him an extraordinary body of work, which dealt obsessively with the problems of identity, madness and solitude. Lucio's Confession is the first of his novels to be translated into English. A brilliant and remarkable short novel of great eroticism and enigmatic beauty Lucio's Confession is set in the fin de siecle artist circles of Paris and Lisbon. It deals with the friendship of two young Portuguese poets, Lucio and Ricardo de Loureiro, and their search for identity through love. When the bachelor Ricardo returns to Lisbon, to everyone's surprise he is accompanied by a wife. She, Marta, seems the perfect partner, and establishes an immediate rapport with his close friend Lucio on the latter's return from Paris. Soon they become lovers. Despite the passionate nature of their relationship, Lucio suspects that Marta is sharing her favours with Ricardo's other close friends. Something is not quite right. Where did this mysterious woman meet Ricardo, and, indeed who is she? Why does she never speak of her past and why is Ricardo conniving at her infidelity? Lucio's attempts to unravel this mystery have tragic and terrible consequences.